I worked extremely hard this weekend for nothing. The weather in Kansas City this winter has been extremely severe. There are several inches of snow on the ground, nightly lows below zero and we haven’t seen 32 degrees since Christmas Eve. I’ve probably shoveled our driveway ten times already and the forecast is calling for it to snow more and be even colder! We have so much snow that I was actually worried about our rear deck collapsing under the weight of the snow so I went out in the ridiculously cold temperatures to shovel the snow off the deck. When I went out there I didn’t bother putting on a coat, but had my phone in the pocket of my sweatshirt. After a couple of minutes of shoveling off a little snow, I came back in and immediately noticed that my phone was gone.

Panic set in. My phone is a Blackberry (correction: was a Blackberry). For anybody who has one you know how desperate I became. These phones are absolutely addicting. I honestly can say that I haven’t been bored for one second since I got my first one back in August. This is my second one (I had a similar panic when I left my first one—which I never got back—in a rental car last month). So I went back out to the deck where I completely cleaned off every inch of snow and it wasn’t there. Time to call in reinforcements— I got the whole family outside in the yard. Did you get that? I’ve got kids shoveling snow OUT OF MY BACKYARD! They helped me for a little while looking in a foot of snow for a phone before they decided I was an idiot and that fact shouldn’t require them to dig through snow in the backyard in single digit temperatures— and I agreed and sent them in the house. So, with more snow in the forecast, I had to shovel the snow out of my backyard by myself. I worked desperately until the sun went down and I finally just gave up and activated an old 5-pound, 6-inch-thick phone that I used about ten years ago. I thought I could look for it again the next morning, but I woke up to find we had just gotten another three inches of snow overnight. I gave up. I guess I will find it when the snow melts, which, at this rate, is going to be sometime in late June.

I realized while working so hard that most of the hard work I’ve done in my life is because I made a really stupid decision minutes before the hard work began. You all know what I’m talking about. Like deciding to drive a rear-wheel-drive vehicle the day after a foot of snow fell and then having to dig my way out of a ditch; like making a decision to change my own oil (that took two full days for me), or even in business when a manager consciously decides to lower his selling prices to severely low margins to generate business. There are people in the business community right now who are so eager to be busy that they sell their products too cheap, place no value on the services they provide, destroy every competitor’s bid … and they work really hard … and they lose money.

I suppose it’s easy to confuse working hard with being successful. I know some very highly respected managers who are highly respected because of their work ethics and not their financial statements. These are the people who get to work at 4 a.m. and work 70 hours a week and have tons of sales and then at the end of the month they seem shocked that they didn’t make a profit. After all, our goal is to be busy right? Or is our goal to make a profit? Being busy is great, but it doesn’t equate to financial success. Next time, before you require your whole team—or family—to dig through the snow for you, make sure you’re making the right decision.